


Canary

by zmeischa



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fandom Kombat 2013
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-14 13:42:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1268518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zmeischa/pseuds/zmeischa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa, trapped in an abusive marriage, finds out that art works in mysterious ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Canary

Sansa looked at the red water in the toilet bowl and rejoiced. Once, in her past life, she used to hate her period: she would always feel like crying then, her stomach would hurt and she would felt dirty. Now, the advent of her period meant that she’d managed not to get pregnant and that Joffrey would leave her alone for whole four days – he was very squeamish about menstrual blood. 

It wasn’t the sex that Sansa was worried about: it never lasted too long, she was super good at faking orgasms and Joffrey would leave afterwards because he didn’t like sleeping in her bed. But every time Joffrey came to her flat, sooner or later she would do something wrong and he would have to punish her. 

He’d beat her very carefully, leaving no trace, his deftness indicating a vast practice – her golden prince, her dream lover. Every time she’d try to keep her dignity, to have the proud look of a Christian martyr, but every time she’d fail and burst into tears sooner or later. Then Joffrey would take her by the scruff of the neck, as if she were a naughty kitten, drag her to the mirror and, while she was choking on tears and snot, tell her:

“Look at yourself. Just look at yourself. Why did I ever marry you, huh?” 

The first time he said it, Sansa replied:

“To get the blocking stake of _Stark international._ ”

He gave her a real beating after that, and she has never repeated her words. But every night, composing an imaginary plea to the imaginary divorce court, she would mention the blocking stake. He had my father murdered, Your Honour. He married me to get the blocking stake of _Stark international_ and to keep me from testifying. He hit my dog with his car and blamed my sister, and I believed him. He took away my cell phone and didn’t let me talk to mommy even once. He twisted my wrist, pulled my hair, hit me in the tummy with his fist. And he didn’t buy me a piano. 

The stupid piano kept reemerging in her indictment, as if to prove that Joffrey was right and she was, indeed, a hopeless idiot. But since she was seven years old Sansa had never lived without a piano, she would even book hotel rooms with one. She used to play the piano two hours every day – four hours before the performances. She would play six, eight hours now, she’d do anything not to see her father’s head burst, not to feel his blood on her face. 

She did try to explain to Joffrey her dire need of a piano, but he ordered her not to whine. One of the guards must’ve heard them, because afterwards he shoved his mp3-player into Sansa’s hand and said: “You listen to that, canary”. (For some reason, he’d call her that). It was a mixture of country music, Irish folk-songs and heavy metal – just the kind of music her missing younger sister loved. Every night from that day on Sansa fell asleep wearing headphones. 

She came out of the bathroom, heard the sound of a vacuum cleaner and stopped. The cleaner, an elderly stocky Mexican woman, came every day. A week after her wedding Sansa exchanged her emerald earrings for the cleaner’s cell phone. It turned out to be out of charge, and fifteen minutes later Joffrey entered the flat, said: “You bitch!” and hit her in the face. 

For the last six weeks Sansa had been trying to get a phone. At first she asked Joffrey for it, and when he told her not to be an idiot, she begged all her guards one by one. Just for a moment. Just to find out about her little brother. Honestly, only for that. Finally one of them grumbled: “Out of coma, still in ICU”. When Sansa didn’t dream about her father walking towards her at the subterranean parking-lot, she dreamt about her cell phone encrusted with pink diamonds, and about screaming into it: “Mommy, I’m so sorry! Mommy, I swear I’ll be good! Mommy, he beats me! Mommy, please take me home!” 

When she was awake she knew that no one would take her home, no one would save her. She imagined the most preposterous escape plans: to break off a chair-leg and hit her guard on the head, to tear her sheets, make a rope and climb out of the window, to make five hundred paper cranes and write SOS on each of them… When someone had tried to kill her brother in the ICU, her mother had stuck manicure scissors into the killer’s throat. Every day Sansa would twiddle her manicure kit – and every day she would put it back. She could speak four languages, play the piano, paint, stitch and make soap, but she was absolutely unable to kill anyone with a nail file. 

She went back into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. “You _are_ a canary”, she said sadly, and then she knew what she had to do. 

She was guarded by six men in four-hour shifts. Five of them wore identical black suits and looked at her with the same indifference they would look at their employer’s pet. But the sixth man did talk to her, probably because he‘d been the one to find her on the subterranean parking-lot and carry her upstairs. He gave her the player. He told her that Bran was out of coma. He dubbed her “canary”. He scared her more than the other five guards put together. 

He was very tall – the crown of Sansa’s head barely reached his shoulder. He wore dirty jeans and a T-shirt, and you could see a tattoo on his left forearm – a snarling bulldog. He had a huge knife as well as the holster, and sometimes he would take this knife out of its sheath and play with it. But the scariest thing about him was his face. 

Seen from the right, he was merely homely. But the left side of his face was cleft with five deep vertical scars of burgundy colour. One of them went right over his eye, splitting the eyebrow in two halves. Another one distorted his mouth. His left ear looked as if a hungry beast had chewed a piece off of it – you could barely see it under his long black hair, but Sansa knew the horrible ear was there. 

It was a deliberate, carnival deformity, more a Halloween mask than a human face, and each time Sansa looked at him, she’d become weak in her knees and feel an awful urge to touch her own face. 

She went to the front door and scratched on the doorpost. 

“Pardon me, but could you please sit for me?” 

“What?”

“Si… I mean, could you sit without moving, while I draw you?” 

“Hey, canary, you must think I’m totally daft.” 

“Not now,” Sansa added quickly. “Later, when your shift is over. But right after that, because I’ll need daylight. If it is not too much of a bother”. 

“No bother. Need I change my boots?” 

“I’m sorry? No, why would you do that?” 

“Well, you always stare at my feet”. 

He grabbed her chin. 

“Look me in the eye, canary. I’m pretty, huh? You wanna make a picture of me?”

“Y-y-yes,” Sansa stammered. “P-p-please. If you could be so kind”. 

He barked with laughter, let her go and turned his back to her. 

Sansa returned to the apartment, sat on the floor and stayed there for a while, feeling only the damp circles under her armpits. Then she forced herself to rise and take a shower. 

She loved painting beautiful things: her mommy and her brothers, cats and puppies, ripe fruit, pastry, porcelain cups, sunsets and old churches. Those paintings made lovely presents for the elderly relatives and for her father’s employees. She tried her hand at the abstract genre once, but her art teacher looked at the resulting picture and said in a very serious tone: “Miss Stark, you can achieve great things in textile design”. To tell the truth, the painting, aptly named “Mood 1”, did look like a fabric for sundress. 

She had no idea how she would draw such an ugly man. For a moment she had a wild idea to ask him to undress and turn his back, as nude models did, but the very thought of seeing him naked made her queasy. _Velasquez_ , she reminded herself, _Goya_ , but she was neither, just a pretty amateur. She spent some time at the mirror, braiding and unbraiding her hair, made two plaits, said: “Eww!” and in the end contented herself with ponytail. 

When the entrance door opened, Sansa was standing in the corridor wearing a friendly smile. 

“I’m so glad you came! Would you care for some coffee? I have a great coffee-machine”. 

“You got beer?”

“N-n-no, I don’t believe I have… Please forgive me”. 

“I see”. 

Sansa thought he’d leave now, nearly fainted with terror, smiled even wider and said:

“So silly, I don’t even know your name”. 

“Dog,” he snapped.

“I beg your pardon?”

“’Tis my name, canary”. 

“No, it’s not!” Sansa said angrily. “You can’t be called like that, it’s’ just a sobriquet. You must have a real name. And by the way, I have one too, it’s Sansa Stark, _not_ “canary”. Why “canary” of all things?” 

“Well, you’re a good singer”, he cut short and went to the living-room. Sansa tried to recollect whether she had ever sung in his presence – it appeared that she hadn’t. It was strange to think that one of those evenings when she was playing the piano, singing Schubert, smiling to her father and feeling so happy, that angry ugly man was standing behind the column, unseen by everyone, listening to her. 

In the living-room he sprawled on the sofa, the very place Sansa chose for herself. 

“Well, what you gonna paint? A demon with my face?” 

“I have no idea”, Sansa admitted. “I’ve been drawing such strange things lately… Take a look”. 

Joffrey took away her watercolors to prevent her from mucking the apartment, but he let her keep her color pencils. The black pencil was almost gone – Sansa spent the first three days after her father’s death covering sheets of paper with black color, endeavoring to leave no trace of white. These days she was drawing the same picture again and again: bright multi-colored cars and a red stain on the dark-grey floor. The cars were very well-drawn, but the stain kept leaving her unsatisfied. Probably it was just hard to draw blood with color pencils. If she had her oils…But Sansa wasn’t very good with oils anyway, she disliked the smell. She and Joffrey were very compatible in some ways. 

Dog – no, she wasn’t going to call him that! – carelessly went through her drawings and threw them on the sofa. 

“So, canary, you want me to pity you or what?” 

That was precisely what Sansa had wanted, but the scorn in his voice stirred the famous Stark pride within her. 

“No!” she snapped. 

“Like hell you don’t. Well, go on, cry some”. 

“No I won’t!” 

“Yes you will. You keep bawling all the time. Believe yourself in dojo, I guess”. 

Sansa was so amazed her tears stopped. 

“What do you mean – in dojo?”

“Learning karate or some shit like that. Someone twists your arm, you say, “I yield”, they let you go. You’re not in the dojo, canary, you yield, you get killed”. 

“I’ll be killed whether I yield or not”. 

“Well, two billions of Chinese don’t give a fuck about that. Every man for himself, rich girl. Every man for himself”. 

Sansa waited in silence till he slammed the front door behind himself, took a clean sheet and began drawing. By the time her supper was brought, she had drawn outlines of six cars. 

The supper was just the way she liked: green salad, poached salmon with vegetables and a lemon cake. Joffrey knew her tastes well. He took away her family, freedom and self-respect but he always made sure she had her favorite dessert. 

He came late in the evening. He smelt of cologne, whiskey and mint – he suspected he had halitosis and kept sucking peppermints. 

“Joffrey, it started”, Sansa said guiltily. 

He gave her a look of amazed contempt and she thought – she wasn’t able not to – how handsome he was. 

“Sometimes I wonder,” he said in an indifferent voice, “whether you can do anything right. It’s a simple thing. That doesn’t require brains. But you can’t, idiot, can you?”

Sansa flinched, expecting a blow, but he just turned and left – she disappointed him so badly. 

And still, going to bed, she managed not to cry. You cry – you yield, you yield – you get killed. Tonight she didn’t cry. 

She fell asleep with earphones in her ears and dreamt about being a wolf and running in the woods. 

The next day, when the cleaning lady came, Sansa met her with a radiant smile. 

‘¡Holá! ¿Qué tal?’

The cleaning lady gave her a suspicious look and dragged the vacuum-cleaner to the living-room without saying a word. Sansa followed her, sprouting intermediate-level-Spanish. 

“Do you have children? Or grandchildren? Look how beautiful, take this for your daughter, or granddaughter, or niece”. 

For the first time in six weeks Sansa drew something other than a subterranean parking-lot and a puddle of blood. She had racked her brain about something that would please a child of indefinite gender or age, and somehow ended with drawing three dragons – yellow, red and dark-green. The dragons were plump and merry and resembled rubber toys, and Sansa, looking at her drawing, called herself a canary, but changed nothing. 

“Do you have a big family? I have a sister and three brothers. My elder brother is very handsome, he has red hair and blue eyes, girls like him. My younger brother is very kind, he is ill now, it is very sad. My sister is not very beautiful but very brave, she does sport,” Sansa didn’t know the Spanish word for kendo and suspected that the cleaning lady didn’t either. 

The vacuum cleaner went to the bedroom. Sansa exhausted the family topic, said a thing or two about the weather, enquired whether the cleaning lady would care for some coffee and spent some time speaking about food. She also knew how to describe clothes, talk about hobbies and travels and discuss health and illness, and she was seriously considering complaining about a headache, when the cleaning lady put the vacuum cleaner into the closet and said:

‘No voy a ayudarte.’

After that she went to clean the toilet bowl, and Sansa went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee. “I’m not going to help you”. Every man for himself, rich girl. 

In the afternoon she heard the front door open and dashed around the room not knowing where to hide. The cleaning lady always came in the morning, and Joffrey – in the evening. The steps in the corridor could mean only one thing – silent men in black suits who would throw her from the window, or drown her in the bath, or put a noose around her neck and hang her on the chandelier, but first they’d grab her, touch her, put their hands over her mouth to muffle her cries…

“Hi, canary”, said the scary guard named “Dog”, and Sansa started breathing again. If he’d come to murder her, he wouldn’t say “Hi”, would he?

“Good day”, she said in a shaky voice and put aside manicure scissors she had grabbed. 

“So, you wanna draw me?” 

_No, I don’t_ , she thought. _Go sway, I’m afraid of you._

“Yes, of course. Could you please stand right there, next to the window, and try not to move. You may talk to me, but don’t be hurt if I don’t answer – it would mean I can’t hear you”. 

Sansa deliberately asked him to stand and not to sit – she had drawn people before and she remembered how hard it was for an unexperienced model to keep one pose even for ten minutes. She was hoping he’d grow tired and leave. Moreover, when he was standing, his face looked less big, less… terrible… 

She could feel his stare, so point-blank it felt almost like a touch. Sansa was accustomed to men staring at her legs, boobs and lips, but she usually was sickened by those stares, as if they were some sticky taint. She had wished to be desired while totally inaccessible, but she knew how easily inaccessible might become useless, and from time to time she would give up, would deign to satisfy their desire. She regarded sex as something both precious and disgusting, a great power which you attained by rolling in the mud. But as the man with a burned face was staring at her, she felt as if a dry flame was caressing her skin. It was scary as hell, but not disgusting in the least. 

After half an hour, annoyed, she put away the spoiled sheet. She had drawn some kind of a dwarf with a huge head, and the “Dog” hadn’t moved even once, and you could see he was able to keep his stance till the evening. 

“Go on, ask me”, he said suddenly. 

“Ask you about what?”

“Why my mug’s so ugly”. 

Sansa took a clean sheet without saying a word. 

“You know summat about Optimus Prime?” he asked. 

“He’s a robot-transformer from space”. 

He laughed. 

“Wow, canary, how come you know that?” 

“I have three brothers”, Sansa said and breathed through her nose to stop her tears. 

“I see. Well, my brother… No. You see, when I was five, my dad went to the slammer again, and we moved to the trailer park. No heating there, and the winter was cold, so my mum, she bought a heater, the one with the ribs, you know? So, I’m five, my brother’s eleven, and he gets this Optimus Prime somehow. I mean, he stole it, or he just took it from some kid. And he never lets me play with the toy. So I take it anyway, when he don’t see me. And one day he sees me. So what he does, he grabs me like that”, he came closer to Sansa and roughly took her by the neck, “and he pushes my mug into that heater. And he… holds me there. Then our neighbors, they heard me yell, and they dragged him from me. Well, _eventually_. I mean, in trailer park you gotta scream _a lot_ to make your neighbors come…”

Sansa thought she was going to throw up right on his T-shirt. She wanted to sit on the floor, to press her head to her knees and to rock till her father came, patted her shoulder and said: “Hey, baby, what’s the matter?” But her father was dead, and no-one in the whole world was going to embrace and console her, so she patted that man’s shoulder and whispered:

“Hush, baby, don’t cry, it’s all right”. 

“You’re such a fool, canary”, he said in a constrained voice, let her go and went, almost ran away. 

Sansa went to the kitchen and drank ice tap water until her forehead hurt. Then she returned to the living-room and looked at the clean sheet. She had no wish to draw cars and blood stain anymore. 

The world she was born to and bred in was comfortable, sane and fair. Sansa was a talented beauty and a billionaire’s daughter because she was worthy, and all the small troubles, like quarrels with her sister, were just the opportunities to demonstrate her perfect manners and her easy temper. So, when the world suddenly became so cruel to her, Sansa knew it was her own fault. She had disobeyed her father. She signed the papers he had told her not to. She married Joffrey. She deserved all the bad things that happened to her. 

But it appeared that the world had always been cruel and unfair, she just managed to ignore it. The universe didn’t care about her petty sins, as it didn’t care about children who crippled each other in trailer parks over cheap plastic toys. The bad things that happened to her were done by people, and you could fight people. You could outwit people. You could defeat people. 

She squared her shoulders, breathed into her diaphragm as she’d been taught and sang a scale. Then another one, a tone higher. 

“Canary yourself!” she exclaimed. 

She spent the rest of the day remembering children songs she used to sing at the choir. For the first time in a month she didn’t fall asleep listening to her player – she hummed a lullaby instead, singing it to Bran, or to herself, or to some unknown baby who, she dreamed, was lying next to her hugging her neck. 

In the morning she felt brave enough to try singing some arias. She went to the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror and started vocalizing _Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen_. When the cleaning lady found her at that, Sansa blushed and escaped to the living-room. 

She finished her drawing, admired it for a bit and started singing Schubert’s “Ave Maria”. For a moment she imagined herself in a cathedral, where it smelt of incense, and the candles burned, and the tourists furtively took pictures of the ceiling and shuffled in the nave to avoid hindering people who prayed. She sang it to the end and felt that there was indeed someone standing in the corridor. 

“Chirping, little canary?” jeered “Dog”. “So, you gonna draw me today?” 

Sansa lifted her drawing from the table. 

“No, thank you, it is done. Would you like to have a look?” 

From the drawing a terrible face was looking at them. Its left side wore a cruel grin while the right one raged a fire crossed by five vertical bars. A caged flame. 

“What _is_ your real name?”

“Sandor Clegane”, he rasped. 

Sansa took a color pencil and wrote _Sandor Clegane_ on top of the drawing in a bold hand. Then she signed it in the bottom right corner and put a date. 

He took the drawing by the corner with two fingers, as if it were a butterfly wing, turned and left. 

“Thank you so much,” Sansa said, when the door closed behind him. “You are such a wonderful artist, Miss Stark. It was nice talking to you. I hope we’ll meet again. Goodbye. I just _love_ well-mannered people”. 

She felt that her shoulders were aching and her right arm felt numb. The strange feeling that carried her like a balloon the past hours was gone, the balloon shrank. She tried singing again but her voice seemed shrill. _Canary_ , she thought, _sitting in my cage and chirping. Tomorrow evening my master will come and bring me some seeds. Or maybe he’ll wring my neck._ She went to the kitchen, made herself a cup of coffee, stared at it till it was cold and poured it into the sink. 

For the last six weeks she’d been feeling like a rough sketch, bearing some resemblance to the original but devoid of color. While she was drawing Sandor she felt that he, in his turn, was painting her, coloring her eyes their natural blue, giving back the auburn luster to her hair, that his gaze, like a painter’s brush, was filling the contours of her empty body. And now he just took his portrait and left, and Sansa felt once more growing colorless, two-dimensional, transparent. 

When the apartment door opened again, Sansa raged. How long are they going to keep frightening her? She took a deep breath and got ready to explain it to the visitor that this place was neither a prison nor a zoo, and that polite people had a pleasant habit of knocking… Sandor Clegan entered the room. He was holding a large bloodied knife. 

Sansa tried to scream but she managed only a stifled squeak. She stood, mouth agape, looking at the drops of blood on the white carpet, an awful senseless yell sounding in her head: “Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” 

“You listen to me, canary,” Sandor rasped. “I’m a trailer park trash, I booze, I smoke weed, I don’t even have a TV, and I’m… a bad lover. Not gentle enough or something. But I’ll kill anyone who tries to hurt you. Gun, knife, chair, bare hands – I can kill with anything, they taught me in the army. My SUV is at the door, say one word and I take you from here. You get it?” 

Sansa didn’t. Her world was rippled, like a broken TV screen, all she could see was the blood on the blade, all she could hear was the yell in her head. Sandor came close, grinned and kissed her lips. 

She felt she was drowning, slowly sinking into the green depth pierced by sun rays, and all around her incoherent sensations swirling like shipwrecks: taste of whiskey… smell of sweat… something hard against her spine… _He doesn’t’ know how to kiss_ , she thought, and those words were like a fish-hook that caught her and jerked upward. 

She opened her eyes, took a deep breath and caressed his scars with her fingertips. And then the whole sense of his speech fell on her like a heap of pebbles. _He killed the guard – he wants to take me away – he knifed the guard – he wants to take me away – he kissed me – he wants to take me away – there is a dead man behind my door – he wants to take me away…_

“Yes,” she said quickly, “yes, please”. 

Sandor nodded and let her go. The hard thing at her spine turned out to be the handle of the bloodied knife and Sansa felt like fainting from terror but somehow didn’t. Sandor took his leather jacket off and threw it on her shoulders. 

“It’s cold outside”, he explained.

She’d spent six weeks locked at the apartment, and meanwhile winter came… 

Everything she needed to take: pearl ear-rings, green dress, toothbrush, spare panties, manicure kit – went in a whirlpool in front of her mental stare and returned to their places. She couldn’t imagine going to the bedroom, opening her wardrobe, searching the chest of drawers… She put the player into her left pocket and the box of color pencils into her right and said:

“I’m ready”. 

She thought that she’d have to pass the dead guard, lying in a pool of blood, and felt like fainting again. 

“On one condition only,” she added, fighting the queasiness. 

“Well.”

“I’ll drive. You can’t, you’re under the influence”.


End file.
